What Makes a Video Good?

Last September I put up a blog post on this video called Out of Thin Air, which was in reference to the two day time span that particular video was shot in to make a publishing deadline. There was a national tv programme on Belvoir Castle scheduled to broadcast on the subject of Capability Brown and one of the shoot guests, a marketing man, suggested to the Duchess that she capitalise on the exposure and interest it would generate by getting a video up on the Guns and Pegs website to promote the Belvoir shoot.

Well, that was a good call. They just had a record year at the Belvoir shoot.

I can only say the video probably had something to do with that. All I have are the video’s analytics look at. I’m not able to do any correlation to Belvoir’s income at this time.

But at this writing I can say it’s one of my best performing videos with over 8500 views in 4 months at this writing.

Analytics suggest that the views are all the result of organic search and/or YouTube suggesting the video to a similar search. Besides, I know for a fact that there was no marketing done for this video aside from my titling and tagging it and their putting it onto the Guns and Pegs website where it plays back in a very small window.

Most of my views are usually from the U.S., even though I live in England. This one, however, has most of the views coming from the UK.

The retention rate (what percentage of the entire video that people watch) is quite high at 72%. However, 60% of the people watch it straight through practically to the end. It starts to drop off as the Duchess does the ‘come to Belvoir’ call to arms in the last few seconds of the video. You can see the analytics screen grabs at the bottom of this post.

It’s my feeling that the reason they drop off at the end is they’re already sold, which is what should happen. A ‘call to arms’ is there to tell people what to do and who to contact. In the case of Belvoir, that may be a moot point. Everyone in the shoot world knows about Belvoir Castle and knows how to contact.

Of course not everyone watching this can afford to shoot at Belvoir, but it’s a good chance that those who can will now want to if they haven’t already.

So what makes this a good video?

The complete answer is something I’ve written about in detail in the book Run ‘n Gun Videography–The Lone Shooter’s Survival Guide, about £5 on Amazon.

Is it a perfect video? No. Shot over two days and edited over a couple more had its compromises. Fortunately I had a few shots done last year I was able to pull into the edit that added to the ‘all-seasons, all-weather’ aspect.

Is it the music? I think that had a lot to do with it and I chose it very carefully. It’s driving music with a good degree of excitement and feeling of success. But good music with inappropriate or bad shots and sloppy editing would not have the same result.

You’ll notice that even though this is stock music, the shots are edited to the music making it seem more like the music was scored for the video. It’s integrated and it supports and forwards the message. That’s what music is supposed to do. It’s not something you just tack on at the end. Again, this is something covered in detail in the book. You also find posts in this blog on the subject under ‘Supplements to the Book’.

In short, the reason it is good is that it does its job of getting the message across with impact and interest and every editing decision made was done to achieve that in the best possible way with the material available.